Category Archives: “His Robot Girlfriend”

Previews: Part 3

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It is the year 2037, when men are men and robots are cute.  Mike Smith and his robot wife Patience take a trip to the bottom of the world, and what they find there might just shake the foundations of their marriage and human/robot society.

As it says on the Previews page, this book is coming in 2013, but hopefully it will be early in 2013.  I’m in the middle of chapter six of 16 chapters.  If I can stick to my usual pace, I should have the draft done mid-March.  Allow about a month for editing and that puts it sometime in April.  I get almost daily requests for this book, so I hope it lives up to everyone’s expectations.  Personally, I think it’s so far the best of the three.

My Favorite Bits: Robot Stories

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The other day, somebody asked me, “Wes, you are exactly like Mike in your robot books.  Is your wife anything like Patience?”  My answer was “My wife is pretty damned patient, but she’s no Daffodil.”

Mike is a lot like me, but I would say not 100%– 75 to 80% tops.  Still, many of the little stories and events in the books are taken from life.  In His Robot Wife, Harriet (Mike’s daughter) mentions the time that her father scared the crap out of a kid trying to bully her at the risk of getting fired.  Yup, that’s right from my life.

There’s a tidbit in the book where Jack (Harriet’s husband) is cleaning the puke out of his car because a neighbor he was trying to help vomited and caused a chain reaction.  This story comes from real life– thankfully not mine.  My brother-in-law experienced this.  His wife, like mine (they’re sisters) is always getting him to do something for people he hardly knows, and unlike me, he’s too nice to say no.  He ended up having to clean vomit from three or four other people out of his car.

In the new book, so far, there are fewer little tidbits from my own life, although I am channeling a few cruise vacations as Mike and Patience go on theirs.

My Favorite Bits: More Robot Stuff

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Here are a few more details about the world of His Robot Wife and His Robot Girlfriend.

One of the main background events in His Robot Wife is the presidential election.  I used random names for the presidential candidates, but one of the vice-presidential candidates was named for a teacher I work with.  That was four years ago, and despite huge turnovers in our school district, we still work together.

One of the details that I was really proud of was the payNETime acount.  I needed something that was a cross between Paypal and the broader banking world.  PayNETime is pronounced “pay any time” and it spells NET in the middle.  I was really proud of myself on this one.

Mike and Patience live at 11 North Willow.  During my high school years, I lived at 11 Cottonwood.

The two main robot manufacturers are Gizmo and Daffodil.  Gizmo is another word for mechanism, of course.  Daffodil is the flower and is meant to evoke the idea of Apple.  There are numerous little parallels between Gizmo/Daffodil and IBM/Apple.  Add to that Daffodil is in Cupertino.

My Favorite Bits: Voting in the Future

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So many things in His Robot Girlfriend were not that different than in our own times (because I don’t think the 2030s will really be all that different), that I struggled to add a few fantastic elements.  It is after all, a science fiction story.

One area that I changed up quite a bit from our present world was the presidential election that is occurring in the background of the story.  I made three parties the status quo in the stories, not because I’m an advocate of the Green Party (who is the third along with the Democrats and Republicans), though I do consider myself an environmentalist, but I just thought three parties would be more interesting.  I don’t think America will ever have more than two major parties (the 1912 election nowithstanding).  I also gave the US 57 states, including Cuba– also pretty unlikely.

Some reforms that I added that I do think might happen, and would be welcome, are Internet voting, and a single election time across the nation.  In the story, voting occurs between 7AM Eastern Time and 7PM Pacific Time.  Though states are currently firmly in control of election procedures, with the rate of technological change, I could see both of these things happening.

As always though, I chose these things not because I like the idea myself, but because I thought it was more interesting for the story.  If you haven’t read His Robot Girlfriend, check it out.  It’s free just about anywhere you can find ebooks, and has been downloaded to date 422,860 times.

My Favorite Bits: Mansfield Perk

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In His Robot Girlfriend and the upcoming His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue, the local coffee establishment is based on the world of Jane Austen and is called Central Perk.  I admit that when I thought it up, I thought it was far more clever than it probably is.

A friend once asked me why Starbuck’s was named after a character from Moby Dick.  Did Starbuck drink a lot of coffee?  I used that conversation in His Robot Wife.  I also used an experience I myself had at Starbucks, when the barrista asked if she could “try something” and made me a bizarre frappuccino concoction.  In the story, she makes ice tea.  This came from a British cooking show I once watched where the chef made “American Ice Tea” which bore no resemblence to anything I’ve ever seen an American drink.  It was mostly orange juice with about 5 lbs. of mint stuck in it.

There are probably more of my own experiences in the Robot series than any of my other books.  This is because Mike, the main character is more like me than any other character.  There are characters I wish I was more like, but I’m not.

 

Newest Version of His Robot Wife Now Available.

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As I write this, the newest updated version of His Robot Wife is now up at Smashwords and Amazon.  By the time you read this, it should be available for download at all ebook retailers.  On the information page, it says Revision 8-8-12.

On a related note, I am cruising right through the draft of Patience is a Virtue, but I’ve been adding a lot to the original outline– so much that I had to go back and create a new outline.  The result is that this book will probably be much longer than either of the two previous books.  His Robot Girlfriend was 39,000 words, His Robot Wife was 28,000.  Originally I planned the new book to be close to His Robot Girlfriend, but now the outline calls for 64,000 words.  Of course, as I mentioned, usually my drafts get shortened during revision.  But now you know part of what is taking so long.

My Favorite Bits: The texTee and other Technologies

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When I wrote His Robot Girlfriend in 2008, there was no iPad yet.  There was a Sony Reader and an Amazon Kindle, and I imagined them replacing books, so I gave Mike a texTee.  I don’t know how I came up with the name.  Then the iPad came out and made me look kind of lame.  So when I wrote His Robot Wife, I updated the texTee and made it more advanced than an iPad, with a voice activated interface.  Along comes Siri, and I’m outdated again!

One thing they don’t have in my robot stories is a computer.  One of my ideas was that computers just don’t exist anymore as standalone items.  They have computers in everything.  People use texTees (Tablets), wriTees (word processor and more), and vueTees (televisions).  The vueTees have (according to the story): interactivity, inscope (don’t know what that would be), Infinet connections, and threed (probably something like 3D).  They also use t-pods (advanced ipods maybe) and something called an andTee.

I just added the andTee so there would be something that nobody knows about today that they have in the future.  I remember reading the cross-time novels by Harry Turtledove.  In those books, the people of the future have video games and music and something called a fasarta which is never explained.  Maybe the andTee and the fasarta are the same thing.

As I write this, I’m finishing up chapter four of Patience is a Virtue.  I’ve really got a groove going now, but what I’ve written is a lot more than is in my draft.  My books usually get shorter in revision, but this might well be the longest of the three books so far (not too surprising since the others are so short).  Keep an eye out here on your computer or your texTee for more updates.  Thanks.

New Revision of His Robot Girlfriend

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A new revision of His Robot Girlfriend is now available.  As I write this, it is up at Smashwords and Feedbooks, and by the time you read this, it should be available at Kobo, Diesel, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and Sony.

I was sorely tempted to rewrite the whole thing, but I didn’t.  I just smoothed it out, fixed one or two errors, and did some content editing.

One thing I did change was the controversially low price of the Daffodil Robots.  I increased it roughly by tenfold.  It’s probably still rediculously cheap.

Please feel free to download the new version, it is still free of course, and replace your old version.  If you haven’t read it yet, download it and give it a try.  You have my thanks.

The Politics of Global Warming

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I’ve been re-editing His Robot Girlfriend, making quite a few changes.  The changes are all relatively minor.  Though I’m tempted to rewrite the whole thing, I’m not doing it.

Over the years I’ve seen several reviews that renounce my politics because of what I’ve written in His Robot Girlfriend.  I was never sure what politics they were talking about, but I sort of thought it might be about gay marriage– because there is a sort of analog of gay marriage in the human/robot marriage of Mike and Patience.

Only recently did I realizet that what most were talking about was the issue of Global Warming.  When I wrote the book, I didn’t realize that it was even a political issue.  Global warming just seemed to be a fact that scientists generally agreed upon.  I knew that some people believe scientists are involved in some sort of global conspiracy, but then I knew some people don’t believe we landed on the moon and some think the world is flat.  But since I was writing a science fiction book, I took global warmin far beyond what I thought at the time ever might come to pass, just to make a better story.

In the years since I wrote the book, I’ve come to believe that I may have underestimated the effects of climate change.  If I were to write it today, I might have them living beneath tinted domes.

 

Motivations: His Robot Wife

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His Robot Wife was written for entirely different reasons than any other book I’ve written.  All the other books (with maybe the exception of His Robot Girlfriend) were written because I thought I had a great story to tell and I wanted to tell it.  You could say that I wrote His Robot Wife for money, though that’s not entirely accurate.  I priced it an 99 cents even though I could have made more by pricing it higher.  I wrote it because I knew it would sell.

I publish His Robot Girlfriend in 2008, and it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.  Many people wrote and asked for a sequel.  This was a big deal for me.  But I didn’t have a story.  As far as I was concerned, the story of Mike and Patience was over.  Still, people kept asking.  It took me three years to come up with a story for them, and I think it’s probably my weakest plot (but HRG wasn’t popular for its plot, but rather its characters anyway).  So in 2011 I wrote His Robot Wife.  It is short, at 28,000 words, but it went easily enough, and as it turned out, it has sold more copies than all my other books put together.

People still wanted another book in the series, but I really struggled to come up with an idea.  Then one night, it just popped into my head.  If I took the point of view away from Mike and gave it to Patience, a whole series of story ideas presented themselves.  I sat down and plotted out five books.

I spent some time writing the new book last night.  It’s not as easy to write as some other books in my workshop, but I’m having a bit of fun.  Now for those of you who bothered to read to the end… here is a little hint about something in the next book.

Patience acts as a mentor to another Daffodil, teaching her how to seem more human.  Talk about the blind leading the blind.